Samsung Electronics announced the start of mass production of 3nm chips. This is to achieve large-scale mass production ahead of TSMC. It is said that the GAA transistor technology used this time has paper parameters that are even better than TSMC's 3nm! It can be seen that Samsung wants to catch up with TSMC with 3nm chips, but can this plan really be realized?
In order to catch up with TSMC in the semiconductor industry, Samsung has also spent hundreds of billions of dollars in the past few years. Of course, the results are also gratifying. The 5nm process will be mass-produced in 2020, the 4nm process will be mass-produced in 2021, and now the mass production of 3nm chips has been achieved.
It can be seen from Samsung’s various publicity that Samsung is quite confident in this 3nm chip. The 3nm chip produced by
this time uses GAA transistor technology. This technology can significantly enhance the performance of transistor and even replace FinFET transistor technology. According to Samsung's official introduction,
has an optimized 3nm process that improves performance by 23%, reduces power consumption by 45%, and reduces chip area by 16% compared to Samsung's 5nm. Not only that, it is said to be able to operate stably at extremely low voltages. Generally speaking, judging from the paper parameters, Samsung’s 3nm process is stronger than TSMC’s 3nm.
There is also news that Samsung’s 3nm product yield is much higher than market expectations, and it has many new customers. For example, Qualcomm , virtual currency mining machine chip design company Shanghai Pan Silicon Semiconductor (PanSemi), etc., have turned to Samsung because they cannot wait for the first batch of production capacity of TSMC's 3nm process.
If these are true, then it is possible to promote the Samsung wafer foundry to increase its business by 40%, and accordingly, it will compete for more market share from TSMC. I won’t tell whether
is true or false. But compared to Samsung, the outside world seems to be more optimistic about TSMC's 3nm chips.
From a time perspective, Samsung’s 3nm mass production time is indeed one step ahead of TSMC, but being ahead does not mean being ahead.
Take 4nm chips as an example. Samsung is earlier than TSMC in terms of time. But overall it still lost to TSMC. The Snapdragon 8 Gen1 using Samsung's 4nm process is not as stable as the Dimensity 9000 chip using TSMC's 4nm process, both in terms of performance and power consumption.
The Snapdragon 8+ chip recently released by Qualcomm uses TSMC’s 4nm process, and the performance of the CPU and GPU has been significantly upgraded, and the power consumption has also been reduced.
It can be seen that TSMC does have an absolute advantage in the process technology . Although the mass production time of TSMC's 3nm process is slow, because the technology is there, although it has not yet been mass-produced, there are already Apple , Intel , MediaTek , etc. in the queue.
Although based on past comparisons of the process levels between Samsung and TSMC, Samsung has always been outclassed by TSMC , but because the specific application effects of 3nm have not yet been released, it cannot be directly concluded that Samsung's 3nm is not as good as TSMC's. After all, Samsung also has strength. It depends on the specific situation after TSMC's 3nm mass production.
